GoKawiilWe’re all familiar with doomscrolling, spending too much time scrolling endless feeds of content that make you feel bad about everything.
But sometimes when I hear the word “doomscrolling” it makes me think of two other things: the classic video game Doom and, well, scrolling.
That got me wondering if I could make a Doom-inspired game in a web browser where the only thing you do to play is scroll. No moving your character laterally, no jumping. Just scrolling.
So I made it. And it’s fun! Here’s a small clip:
That’s what the game looks like. But here’s what playing it feels like:
You can go play it right now on desktop or mobile. The rest of this newsletter is the non-technical story of how I made the game.
The first time was a failure
As readers know, I’m not a coder, but I enjoy how vibe coding lets me turn an idea into something real. So naturally, I turned to vibe coding for this.
It didn’t work.
This was around nine months ago. I tried and tried, but none of the LLMs were able to help me go from idea to a playable game at all. Like, not even close. GPT-4 absolutely refused to understand that scrolling down a page means that the background should move up the page. I ended up with something kinda pathetic that didn’t even resemble a game. So I gave up, figuring this was either beyond an LLM’s skills, beyond my skills, or both.
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